Wednesday, December 30, 2015

This station has been non-operational for the better part of the last two years, for a few different reasons. Practically, I was forced to really prioritize my dissertation work, as well as my paying gig as a guitar teacher, and didn't really have time to post.

The bigger issue though was that I didn't feel motivated to make or find time to write here, because I haven't been interested in the music, 'scene', 'community', bands, whatever, that I used to think it was so important for me to write about and document here. Or, rather, I no longer feel like that community is interested in me. I feel neither welcome in those cultural spaces or like I belong in them. I don't fit in there, and never really have; I've never had enough chill or been cool enough or available enough or able to not criticize ugly shit when I see it happen. I've never been able to just go with something if I don't think it's working or could be better - but, my critiques of these communities, how they 'do' identities, and their unspoken internal hierarchies and markets are a topic for a different post and a different time.

The point is, feeling like I didn't have real friends, or even kind acquaintances at shows made going to them and trying to socialize and find new music a chore.

So, I stopped. I stopped paying attention to the cool successful 'queer punks' I know and started to focus on work, and on the pop music my guitar students are into. I stopped going out, and I started watching tv and listening to the radio in the car, and started reading feminist pop and tv criticism, and I realized that I was happier that way.

And that's pretty much what this year end mix is about: it's about recognizing what isn't working in your life, figuring out how to fix it, finding things that do make you happy, and learning to believe that, as the kindest and most humane of the cool queer punk kids once told me, pop will save us all.